ure imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on
Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there
is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must
be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote:
Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination
may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth."
[Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.]

If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires,
that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a
prophet? Shelley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic
shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the
phenomenon thus: "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, the
one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are
not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing
with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association
of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of
superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can
foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The
Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_,
_Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many
poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy.
[Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_,
_Hear the Voice of the Bard_; Crabbe, _The Candidate_; Landor, _Dante_;
Barry Cornwall, _The Prophet_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_; Coventry
Patmore, _Prophets Who Cannot Sing_; J. R. Lowell, _Massaccio_, Sonnet
XVIII; Owen Meredith, _The Prophet_; W. H. Burleigh, _Shelley_; O. W.
Holmes, _Shakespeare_; T. H. Olivers, _The Poet_, _Dante_; Alfred
Austin, _The Poet's Corner_; Swinburne, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_;
Herbert Trench, _Stanzas on Poetry_.] Holmes' view is typical:

We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,--
Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark
While others only note that day is gone;
For them the Lord of light the curtain rent
That veils the firmament.
[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.]

Most of these poems account for the premonitions of the poet as Shelley
does; as a more recent poet has phrased it:

Strange hints
Of things past, present and to come there lie
Sea